Stripcraft
Branding, Tagline Development, Website Design and Development
Background
Stripcraft gives everyday women the excuse, opportunity, and approach to live out their dreams of being sexy, badass babes. Through both online and in-person strip instruction and experiences, the brand provides a comfortable, safe environment for clients to explore their racy fantasies.
Our task was to create a bold visual brand experience that reflects the edgy, sexy nature of Stripcraft. Before working with us, the brand lacked polish. As some of their retreats and offerings are high end, they wanted to create a higher end appeal without losing the edgy vibe that makes them who they are.
The brand and website we developed expertly aligns these needs. The new Stripcraft brand feels like a secret bad girl’s club where women can shed their business suits for rhinestones and indulge in some grown-woman playtime. The brand is super dynamic, packed with material, and designed to grow, evolve, and expand to suit any future needs.
Moodboard
This project’s moodboard gave an intriguing peek into the world our branding sought to create. Typography is scripted and edgy, incorporating elements of traditional neon lettering to evoke a sense of classic allure. Layouts are designed to be bold and striking, with deep, rich colors, intricate patterns and textural overlays to add depth and interest.
Backgrounds are lush and textured, lending a luxurious and sultry feel that’s both grounded and gritty. This combination ensures a high-end aesthetic that doesn’t sacrifice the brand’s raw, edgy essence.
Tone-on-tone color schemes create an air of sophisticated luxury, which is enhanced with contrasting neon accents. These vibrant pops of color draw attention to calls-to-action, ensuring they stand out and engage.
The moodboard sets the stage for a dynamic and immersive visual experience, capturing the essence of the brand while also paving the way for future creative development.
Logo Design
Our collection of logo designs for Stripcraft is designed to leave an indelible mark In every context and for any conceivable need.
The brand’s wordmark combines gothic-inspired blackletter capitals with compressed calligraphic uppercase characters. The tagline is rendered in a simplified blackletter typeface, while "by Lux ATL" is presented in an unconventional humanist sans-serif. Enhanced with graphic rays over the “S”, the logo exudes a tantalizing, forbidden allure. A line drawing of a dancer completes the picture, serving as either a standalone branding element or a complement to the logo itself.
The ray motif extends seamlessly into submarks, ensuring consistent branding across various applications. These submarks can be strategically utilized to reinforce the Stripcraft identity, delineate brand content, and guide attention effectively.
Our logo package included a plethora of variations, including the master logo, a primary logo, a stacked logo with a tagline and byline, a tagline monogram with rays, submarks, color variations of all of the above, and more. With the brand’s vast menu of retreats, programs, and classes, there is now a sophisticated and saucy logo to brand any and every offering.
We even created unique stained glass graphics that could be used as submarks or on their own as branding elements with a punchy impact. This served as a fun addition that Stripcraft could use for branded swag like stickers, merch, and patches.
Sub-brands
Stripcraft is a prolific brand–so much so that it encompasses several sub-brands.
Since every sub-brand tells a unique part of the overarching brand’s story, we developed evocative branding and marketing elements for each. Different retreat lines–StripCabana, StripCabin, and StripWrecked to name just a few–cater to different price points and experience levels, so we crafted effective sales pages to target and focus clientele most effectively.
School of Stripcraft, a year-long subscription to dance classes and intensives, is yet another sub-brand with a need for its own side menu of logos and visual motifs. A big brand needs a nimble, effective visual language that can translate to all its separate offshoots, and this is exactly what we delivered.
Shotlist
A brand focused on making women feel sexy and empowered demanded a very specific style of brand photography–visual heft for a visual practice. As we do for all brand and website clients, we helped Stripcraft procure perfect brand photos for the site (and beyond) with a custom shotlist guidance document.
With detailed guidance and targeted inspiration like the brand’s moodboard and curated example photos, our guide helped Stripcraft’s photographer get exactly the right shots we needed to punch out the brand’s visual story. Time-tested best practices on setting, styling, color choices, shot types, groupings, and other fundamentals laid the foundation, but we also included specific advice for shots that would cater to both Stripcraft’s naughty aesthetic and its focus on teaching.
In the brand photography that resulted, saucy close-ups of body parts, glimpses of slinky lingerie, and photo lighting reminiscent of a classic strip club invite the brand’s mood into the room with a resounding bang. Shots of brand proprietor Lux both teaching in front of a laptop in her home studio and dancing on a stage in full stripper regalia emphasize the transformative nature of the brand’s offerings, allowing clients to see themselves doing something they may have thought was out of their league.
Though we didn’t take the images ourselves, our shotlist guidance resulted in photos that would both make the Stripcraft brand a feast for the eyes now and keep it dancing for years to come.
Font Palette
Like any iconic brand, Stripcraft has a dynamic type hierarchy. The type styles we curated for the brand’s font palette work seamlessly together to lend visual clarity and interest to text, making the brand’s written content both easy to read and exciting to behold.
Titles and main headings are treated with a witchy, semi-scripted font whose lingering ligatures evoke images of seamy neon signs. It grabs attention and shamelessly speaks the brand’s intent.
Fonts for secondary and tertiary headings and buttons, while different entirely, feel like they were born of the same family tree, and they help organize copy and content with a consistent visual language.
Combining these edgy headline fonts with highly readable typefaces for body text and quotations achieves a striking yet functional visual balance. This careful dance between dramatic flair and clarity of content writes a potent typographical story, enhancing both engagement and readability across the website and branded content.
Style Tile
Our style tile for Stripcraft gave a perfect glimpse of the visual experience the website would create. Spicy neon tones glow from a dark background, lending an air of the forbidden. Sultry brand photography narrates the brand story. Headlines, calls to action, and visual brand marks lead the eye on a curated journey through the site.
Combining all these, the style tile served as an amuse-bouche for our client, not only teasing all that was to come, but making sure we had nailed the brand’s visual language on the head.
Wireframes
Before diving into the visual design of the website, we first created wireframes to give it a sturdy structure and clear organization. The previous updates to the brand’s site had been done in a fragmented manner, so this phase was crucial to ensure everything was in its proper place before moving on to the full design.
Our process included seemingly minor tasks that are actually crucial for shaping the site’s structure. This included positioning buttons correctly, ensuring smooth text flow, identifying areas where copy needed to be broken up, adjusting emphasis, and enhancing readability through visual cues.
Website Design
With all these branding and design fundamentals in place, the design for the website flowed fluidly from there. Like the Stripcraft brand itself, the website aesthetic is anything but shy.
Elements of the site pop out as if on stage, with a dark, near-black violet providing a backdrop for luscious purples, fuchsias, and teals to ring out against. High contrast use of color signifies bold interest while preserving functionality and clarity.
Brand photography developed from our expert shotlist guidance document compels the eye forward like a knowing performer.
Animations also add to the sense of dance. Elements on each page are not static, but instead weave, slide, and bounce up and down into the viewport, much like the sensual movements the brand teaches.
Small visual markings add punchy branded decorative elements throughout. Fishnet patterns, diamonds, rays, and tagline marks provide extra pops of emphasis, organizational structure, and attitude where it’s needed.
Custom icons capture the sexy, playful ethos of the brand with linework simplicity. This is the visual essence of fun, but taken seriously–compelling women to allow themselves to make an investment into their own pleasure and fantasy.
All this adds up to a website that both informs and performs, just like the PhD-holding former stripper at the helm of the brand.
